Category Archives: Data Warehouse Design

This past Saturday I had the pleasure of speaking at SQL Saturday #552 here in beautiful Jacksonville, Florida. My good friend, Mitch Pearson (blog | twitter) and I presented our session, Designing a Data Warehouse from the Ground Up. We had a great crowd and lots of great questions from the audience!

With all the talk about designing a data warehouse and best practices, I thought I’d take a few moment to jot down some of my thoughts around best practices and things to consider when designing your data warehouse. Below you’ll find the first five of ten data warehouse design best practices that I believe are worth considering. This list isn’t meant to be the ten best “best practices” to follow and are in no particular order. Of course, each design scenario is different so you may find that some of the best practices listed here aren’t optimal in your specific situation.

SQL Saturday #442 in Orlando, FL has come and gone but what a turn out! The event was excellent, we had a great turnout for our session and had a blast! And as a bonus, the BBQ lunch, baked beans, coleslaw, mac n cheese and dessert were amazing. Seriously one of the best lunches I’ve had a SQL Saturday event! Plus, the Lego name tags were epic! 100% without a doubt the coolest name tag ever.

SQL Saturday #442 is upon us and yours truly will be presenting in Orlando, Florida on October 10th alongside Mitchell Pearson (b|t). The session is scheduled at 10:35 AM and will last until 11:35 AM. I’m very excited to be presenting at SQL Saturday Orlando this year as it’ll be my first presenting this session in person and my first time speaking at SQL Saturday Orlando! If you haven’t registered yet for this event, you need to do that. This event will be top notch! Continue reading Data Warehouse from the Ground Up at SQL Saturday Orlando, FL on Oct. 10th→

Thank you to everyone that registered and attended my webinar Designing your Data Warehouse from the Ground Up webinar this past Tuesday. And I’d also like to give a special thanks to my good friend, Mitchell Pearson (b|t), for helping me present this webinar. We had a great time!

Also, thank to everyone that tuned into the live broadcast of the webinar on Periscope! I hope you enjoyed the unique perspective Periscope gives.

Every year at Pragmatic Works some coworkers, including consultants, marketing staff, support team members, software development staff and project management, partake in a company fantasy football league. And with the recent release of the new Power BI Desktop, I thought what better way is there to prepare to completely annihilate my coworkers and friends in an imaginary nonsensical game than by creating some nifty Power BI dashboards based on last years player stats as recorded by Yahoo! Sports. So I thought I’d walk you through some of the steps I followed to leverage the Yahoo! Sports NFL player stats page as a data source and some of the query transformations I applied to prepare the data for reporting.

As a Business Intelligence Consultant, I do a decent amount of speaking, interacting with the community, and have written and contributed on a few SQL Server books. A question I’m often asked is if I can recommend any good books which brings me to this blog post. I wanted to make you aware of four books for learning data warehousing and other MS BI technologies that I’ve found incredibly helpful over the years I’ve spent designing and implementing enterprise data warehouse and business intelligence solutions. Continue reading My Top Four Books for the MS Business Intelligence Professional→